Book of Abstracts

Theo Meuwissen

Strategy
building in farm animal practices – a look into the future

Theo Meuwissen,
Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Norway

In
animal breeding the challenges broad about by climate change are directly addressed
by managing the genetic resources required to adapt to the environmental
changes and by investigating the resilience of genotypes to environmental
changes in terms of genotype by environmental interactions and reaction norms. Animal
breeding practices aim at: (1) foreseeing climatic changes and their effects on
agro-ecosystems and livestock production and predicting future needs with
respect to animal genetic resources, resulting in new breeding goals. (2) To study
genotype-by-environment (GxE) interactions on fertility, longevity and milk
production using multitrait models and reaction norm models over gradients of
geographical location, intensity management and herd sizes. The multitrait
models may be unsuccessful when the environment cannot be accurately
classified, and the reaction norm models require an accurate continuous
parameter grading the environment. (3) To assess accuracy of alternative
molecular genetic diversity measures reflecting the potential of a population
to adapt to environmental changes. (4) To study a variety of breeding
strategies to bring-about the required adaptations in the event of climate
change. Due to future climate changes, shortage of food/feed, water, energy and
land, the future will demand very fast (genetic) adaptation of livestock. Novel
animal breeding strategies are needed to achieve this rapid genetic adaptation,
which are mainly based on animal genetic resources that can facilitate genetic
change by breed substitution or crossbreeding, and genomic selection, and a
combination of both, which is called genomic introgression.